J.A.

Ukraine

[MTT Database Review @MTT_Data_Review]

Banning HUDs is dumb and basically impossible to enforce. Thread:

This isn't about whether you like HUDs or not. I totally accept that some players prefer a more analytical approach to poker, with lots of stats, while others prefer playing without HUDs because they see it as a cleaner, fairer, purer way of playing poker.

I'm just here to tell you that HUDs cannot really be banned. Or, to be more precise, only the ones used by people who follow the rules can be banned.

Whether you like it or not, having stats on your opponents in online poker is a thing. It has been a thing for way too long for players to just give it up. Legal HUDs can be banned, but there is pretty much no way to reliably enforce a ban on underground HUDs.

Poker sites can monitor running processes, but there are ways to capture your screen without running any screen recording software on your PC.

Nowadays your friendly ChatGPT, Grok, Claude, Gemini... will happily help you build an app that reads nicknames and actions from the captured video/screenshots, converts them into .txt hand histories, sends them to another PC running Hand2Note, PokerTracker, Holdem Manager, DriveHUD... and generates a HUD there.

Instead of using a remote desktop app that can be detected in running processes, you could just view it through your browser. I don't think any poker site is planning on banning you from using Chrome, Safari or Firefox during a session. And detecting that is virtually impossible. (Maybe some behavioral patterns, if you exploit someone too hard? I seriously doubt it.)

Or, if that's still too complicated, there are already websites that are basically cloud HUDs available for a subscription. And they already have huge databases of datamined hands ready.

AFAIK, these are mostly for cash games, but if regular HUDs get banned, I'm sure cloud MTT HUD alternatives will appear. Especially nowadays, with how easy these things are becoming to vibe-code.

It won't be as comfortable as a regular HUD, but it will be virtually impossible to detect.

And instead of accepting that some players have an advantage from using HUDs, which are allowed on certain sites and available to anyone, you're now giving an even bigger advantage to people willing to break the rules and bypass the restrictions.

Good luck enforcing that rule unless someone is dumb enough to expose themselves using prohibited software on social media. (Shoutout to the former ACR pros. 😂)

And GG is now taking this even further by banning trackers that aren't even interacting with GG. So someone playing GG alongside PokerStars or ACR can't have a legal HUD running on those sites either. Meanwhile, someone willing to break the rules might still get HUD stats on GG itself.

So that's it? Just let evil, predatory regs quickly strip recreational players of their money using HUDs with their own hand histories, or possibly even quicker with datamined hands?

No. There are other things you can do to lessen the gap between professional and recreational players.

Let's start with giving everyone a useful built-in HUD.

Yes, I know, several sites already have basic HUDs in their clients. But WTF is that? Most recreational players have no idea what half of those stats even mean, let alone what the values should be.

Why can't anyone make it more user-friendly?

For example, why is there no poker site (AFAIK) that lets you save an actual hand to an opponent's profile?

Open the hand history, click "Save to player's notes". Done.

Next time you play against that opponent, you hover over their nickname and see the last five hands you've saved on them, displayed as little hand previews like in Hand2Note4. Click on one to open the full hand replay.

Maybe give players an option to mark their opponents with some simple badges like "loves hunting bounties", etc. Features that every recreational player will immediately understand.

Instead, you have things like GG showing a mini graph of a player's results from their last five tournaments. That is the most useless waste of space imaginable. Whether someone cashed or made a final table in their last five tournaments has basically zero predictive value. Absolutely useless for judging how someone plays.

Changing nicknames is definitely something worth debating. Let losing recreational players change theirs more often? That's a reasonable thing to consider.

Try inventing new formats. Something that makes every decision a bit more unique and harder to put into stats. Knockouts are a perfect example of that. Situations with big bounties can definitely skew a player's stats.

I'm not saying everything should become some Monster Mystery Bounty gamble fest. Just experiment with small changes to formats, structures, etc.

Also, while we're on the topic of preventing predatory regs from quickly bleeding the fish dry...

WHY IS IT STILL SO REWARDING TO LATE-REG AT THE LAST POSSIBLE MOMENT AND STALL EVERY SINGLE HAND?

This is the dumbest way a player can get an edge.

Not by studying opening ranges, cbets, probe bets, ICM, exploiting opponents, maintaining their A-game throughout a long session...

No. Just play as few hands as possible to maximize your chances of min-cashing because late registration ends way too close to the money.

Yes, I know, poker sites are greedy and want to maximize the number of entries in every single tournament. But fighting HUDs while this remains a viable strategy to make money is truly bizarre.

BTW, while I'm on a rant (just a general one, not targeted at GG, AFAIK they don't have these), another incredibly dumb format is rebuy/add-on tournaments where the add-on gives you significantly more chips per dollar than the original buy-in.

Recreational players often don't realize how important taking the add-on is. Sometimes they don't even have enough money in their cashier for it.

So just knowing that you should late-reg at the last possible moment, stall until the add-on and make sure you have better price on your chips can give you a massive ROI boost without having to learn any actual poker strategy.

Oh, and if you really want you can actually solve the whole HUD problem by just making everyone anonymous in-game. But good luck expecting poker sites to police those games properly. Some of the anonymous sites out there aren't exactly famous for their game integrity. Quite the opposite. Also pretty boring when every opponent is just a random string of characters.

End of rant.

TL;DR:

You can't ban HUDs. You can only ban legal HUDs.

Same as with online poker itself. You can ban legitimate operators, but you can't ban all the shady, made-up-license, nonexistent-game-integrity, your-agent-will-probably-scam-you poker sites.

That's something we all know well.

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If there is anything left in crypto worth believing in, it is ETH.

I am a capitalist to the core, a fierce anti-Soviet and anti-socialist. I believe in meritocracy as the main law of evolution, but in this case, ETH can exist ONLY being neutral and social.

Otherwise (concentration of VC capital as in Solana), it loses its main advantage on-chain Switzerland.

No, there is no anti-success.

The fact that the main competitor is using propaganda/marketing tools and human greed to FUD ETH is not a measure of success.

Ponzi will always grow faster, bc it speculates on basic human traits -- greed and fear.

While Ethereum the foundation has many things to improve (including becoming more market-oriented) its main moat is -- neutrality, love it or not.

That's why sovereign states and wealth funds will build on top of it. A guarantee of free speech and will expression. Agnostic of politics, borders and manipulations. Code is law.

No other blockchain can offer anything like that and I believe this is where ETH starts to shine.

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[J.A. @johnacc13]

@VitalikButerin Please reconsider moving the first from *non-goals* to the upper list

[gabriel shapiro @lex_node]

unpopular opinion: all of Ethereum's "problems" would be "solved" if the EF just hired a good marketing department and Vitalik RT'd one great project from the Ethereum ecosystem per week

I have thought through it again and again, and while Solana has some cool things, fundamentally there is no zero-to-one innovation there, it is a smart contract chain with beefier nodes and some cool optimizations, but should not be nearly enough to overcome Ethereum's advantages and more logical long-term roadmap. However, if the FUD and bad price action continues, Solana could 'win' despite Ethereum having every advantage because when new retail comes in, at this point they're going to be buying SOL in droves, not ETH, and this will attract apps, money, more network effects. etc.

The EF needs to *panic* and launch a great marketing operation*now*.

It's literally just a marketing issue, with people not understanding rollup-centric roadmap and its merits and other ecosystems FUDDing that roadmap all day every day (while also copying it under different nomenclature) with no direct rebuttals from Ethereum technical leaders (who are in a Farcaster echo chamber)

Going in a more Solana-ish direction by optimizing the L1 itself will not help ETH price or narrative, it will make it worse imo.

Also there is zero legal reason not to do heavy marketing now that: (1) ETH is irreversibly recognized as a commodity; and (2) Trump will win and all crypto is likely to be low-regulated similarly regardless of marketing or social decentralization levels

Will this happen though? Probably not unfortunately so yeah that is bearish and if I were to recommend to a normie to buy an L1 token right now, it would be SOL not ETH. I'd love for the EF and Ethereum technical leaders to wake up and realize they can have the best design and roadmap in the world, it will not matter if ETH keeps underperforming.

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